How UCSF applies an evidence-based approach to digital health innovation

For healthcare innovations to be truly transformative, designers need input from clinicians that will actually use the tech and outside partners to put patients at the center of it all. In the video below, Dr. Aenor Sawyer, Chief Health Innovation Officer and Director of UCSF’s Skeletal Health Service in the below video outlining UCSF's approach, explains how the system does just that.

“Front-line innovators deeply understand the problem, the pain points well, the workflow, and where that workflow needs to accommodate a new technology or where the workflow needs to be disrupted,” Sawyer said. “We care about these things working because we’re going to end up using them so we do validation and evaluation and then post-implementation monitoring as well.”

Sawyer said that in addition to having people on the front lines of healthcare involved in innovations, the system also partners with outside entities for other capabilities.

She added that such innovations need to be evidence-based from the onset. That starts with knowing the root cause of a problem before entering the design phase, if only to avoid creating yet another point solution.

And it continues for the entire journey of designing, developing, implementing, monitoring and evaluating a particular tool.

“You have to understand the end-to-end journey around it,” Sawyer said. “For the patient, for the healthcare system, the payer, it’s so important to know what your adjacencies are and how to be compatible with them,” Sawyer said.